a digital codex of contemporary pan-american writing

Amazing Microcosm

by Sergio Ortiz

Eloy put a few seeds in my hand.
Thirty trees tomorrow, a forest fifty years later,
birds find the South in those trees,
wolves discover shelter. And ants grow
like a body between blind, sleepy roots.
At some point a house and another house
built by those woods and winter
lowered inside sediments.
Autumn with its total boredom
will put its heavy feet on the thick trunks
and will not conquer them. Nothing makes them break.
And in a hundred years a hundred men
will be happy men loving their women
under those broad roofs, a perfume of forest
will float in the children who arrive in their lives.
The world will be world and night will be night.
Owls will have bigger eyes and they will eat sparrows
as well as scorpions. And the mouse will be as minimal
as a strange insect, his pale hair will make him invisible
from November to February, and he will have no enemy.
Neither will the eagle nor man, if any, the serpent.